So many things change when you really give yourself into following your inner guidance, which I think of as our Inner Wayfinder, as a way of life, not just when it is convenient or when you feel like you have run out of other options.

True confessions: I lived for many years inviting my inner guidance when I remembered, or when it felt convenient, or when I was just at my wit’s end because nothing seemed to be working for me. Then I evolved into a daily practice of faithfully connecting to my inner guidance.

But even then I didn’t have a real 100% commitment to letting my Inner Wayfinder lead my life and my decisions. I had a back-up plan, ie, thinking my way through things, following what we are “supposed to do,” and diligently making things happen, because I hadn’t practiced letting my Inner Wayfinder lead enough to fully trust it. In effect, I was living with one foot in one paradigm and one foot in the other paradigm, never really allowing myself to go into what felt like the free fall of totally following my inner guidance 100%, all of the time.

That way of living in two paradigms is just exhausting. I wore myself out, in spite of how truly good I am at attending to self-care.

It finally dawned on me that this is what my virtual pilgrimage of the last few months has really been about for me. For years I have been very faithful to checking in with my inner guidance, but I realized today that for all of that time, I have been consulting my inner guidance and treating it like a close advisor, taking the wisdom and factoring it into my equations of the decisions and choices I make in my life, like it was a favored member of my inner board of directors rather than the Chairwoman. And I have been very faithful to checking in and consulting with my Inner Wayfinder.

But that is very different than giving myself over, 100%, no kidding, to following my Inner Wayfinder in my life. Not only do I need to trust that the guidance of my inner true self will not lead me astray, I also need to trust that I can access it and hear it and feel it and distinguish it from all the other multitudes of “voices” within me. This takes radical trust in a knowing, that I do have, that our true inner guidance is a force of love that absolutely knows what is best for us and is guiding us to it every minute of every day.

One of the things that changes is that you really don’t know ahead of time where you are going or how the path will play out. But when you get the hang of this way of living, it becomes an unprecedented adventure full of serendipity, synchronicity, surprises and feeling loved and supported.

I’m still stumbling in my commitment to give myself to this way of being guided in my life, 100% by my inner knowing. Not that I don’t have tremendous support from outer resources. Of course I do, but I need to feel what’s right and what isn’t for me from the inside and honor that completely. I have never felt more supported from both inside and out.

The challenge for me is that it takes diligence and radical trust to live this way. Nothing in our culture trains us to allow ourselves to be led fully by our inner knowing. Every day is a practice of remembering, releasing assumptions, conventions and expectations, opening myself to the vulnerability of being guided by my inner knowing, and putting my steps, decisions and actions, in alignment with what I can feel, inside, is right for me. If that isn’t the ultimate pilgrimage, I don’t know what is.

So many things change. And I am just now beginning to discover what those things are.

That’s what I want to write about and share with you on this blog. The Journey of So Many Things Changing. I’m grateful you are here.

P. S. I’m posting drawings that I have made of The Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain. I’ve never been there, but I have chosen to be on a virtual pilgrimage on the Camino for the last several months, beginning in September, 2012. I’ve read pilgrim memoirs, drawn from photographs that inspire me, and meditated, reflected, and journaled about being on a pilgrimage. While this is “only” a virtual pilgrimage for me, it has been a time of powerful inner awakening and change for me, and I continue to explore how being on a pilgrimage, even a virtual one, can help us feel and be more spiritually connected in our daily lives.